The Departure Sonatas by Wade Stevenson

"In his American classic Essays before a Sonata, Charles Ives avows that 'the substance of a tune comes from somewhere near the soul.' It is Wade Stevenson's singular gift to express, with a candor indistinguishable from courage, the vivid geography of that most specific 'somewhere'. These sonatas are personal in the very largest sense. And in their expanse, we are given to see love and loss as imperishable features of a singular landscape and the departures of one soul."

—Donald Revell

"What a wild and wonderful ride! Stevenson's sonatas are exercises in outward growth whose root seems as much to be Whitman as Rumi. This book promises departure, and it certainly delivers, but where the reader arrives--a unbecoming and rebirth--is no less meaningful."

—Kyle McCord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult

Read Wade Stevenson’s The Departure Sonatas as a question — “How to transcend, to rise, to go beyond / Into the pure voluptuousness / Of manifold meanings, symphonic sounds?” — or read it as a quest — “Looking for that place at the edge of understanding.” Either way, it will prove itself true to its own ideal: “to be real / As a hot dog stand.”

—H. L. Hix

Thanks for sharing “The Departure Sonatas”. The poem is heartfelt, sincere, and direct. The core of the poem is about the soul, an indefinable, ineffable part of a person with religious, artistic, and romantic implications. You asked which poets or poems it brought to mind. I thought of Eliot’s “Four Quartets” as a kind of precedent for what you’re doing.

—Sean Singer

"Memory is the great mover in Wade Stevenson’s The Departure Sonatas. But this is memory overlaid and undermined by grief, love, need, and poetry itself. As images flow into the music, revelations appear to the speaker that are then filtered through language and song to the reader, creating a shared space where the music is completed. A lovely journey through a mind attuned."

—Rachel Abramowitz

With The Departure Sonatas, Wade Stevenson offers one of the great long poems of our time. Undaunted by epic expansiveness yet rooted in felt particularity, here is lyric intelligence surrendering itself entirely to sheer being. The four “sonatas” comprising the poem reveal profound and surprising meditations on the ways that we are, all of us, captives of Time, subject to its bewildering irreversibility as well as its sublime gifts. Stevenson remains true to “The only language I know born of the earth,” and the result is a cause for gratitude.

—Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls

Wade Stevenson’s Departure Sonatas pays homage to life as it dwindles “away slowly like a bar of soap.” To die in Stevenson’s mind is less a termination of desire than its transformation, an escape “from the ‘me’/ Who is no longer who I am.” “Blending sweetness and strangeness,” Stevenson is at once both “so ready to say goodbye” to a world where “it’s no longer fun to watch/ How the doors of the day open and close” and devoted to the search “for that special word, the voice / That says, ‘Come back to me.’” Stevenson’s speaker may be an “infinitesimal dot” against “a hundred billion blazing star.” But it is in his humanity that we let go of our pride and stick out our tongues. We return with our childlike wonder, in asking: “Does the sunlight have a taste/ Sweet as toasted marshmallow light?”

—Tiffany Troy, author of Dominus

In these haunting, rich, and meditative poems, Wade Stevenson performs an act of great generosity: offering an open view of the mind as it confronts life’s most difficult questions – namely, what happens when it ends? The true beauty of this work lies not in the arrival at an answer but in the questioning and requestioning, in telling and retelling “the story of how the world / through words / remembers itself. Through his willingness to engage so deeply and elegantly with this process, Stevenson provides “a new promise of illumination” and “a more or less accurate rendering” of all of our “unmappable hearts.”

— Emma Bolden

When reading Wade Stevenson's The Departure Sonatas, I'm reminded of the great Mariane Moore, particularly the poem in which she travels the world to describe a sycamore tree. Stevenson's poems prove equally cosmopolitan in their sensibility and approach. Like Moore's celebrated oeuvre, Stevenson's The Departure Sonatas is well-traveled in terms of geography, but also, in its influences and ways of seeing and understanding the world. But what sets Stevenson apart from any other poet is his ability to marry affect with these larger questions of craft, philosophy, and worldview. These poems are as emotionally charged as they are intelligent. Bravo!

—Kristina Marie Darling, Fulbright Scholar & Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press

Wade Stevenson was born in NYC in 1945. Educated at St. Paul’s School, he studied in Paris, and has travelled extensively throughout Asia. His first book, ICE CREAM PARLORS IN ASIA, was published in 1969, thanks to John Ashbery. BEDS (McCall Publishing Co.) became a poetry best seller. His memoir ONE TIME IN PARIS and his novel THE ELECTRIC AFFINITIES both received critical acclaim. He has published more than a dozen poetry books, including SONGS OF THE SUN AMOR, LOVE AT THE END, and IN THE COUNTRY OF THE PEREGRINE.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 82 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-470-3